(Too) Silent Worship and Whithered Meetings

April 27, 2008

04/27/200802/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

One of the things I liked about my old Quaker job is that I occasionally had a moment in between all of the staff meetings (and meetings about staff meetings, and meetings about meetings about staff meetings, I kid you not) to take interesting calls and emails from Friends wanting to talk about the state of Friends in their area: how to start a worship group if no Friends existed, how to revitalize a local Meeting, how to work through some growing pains or cultural conflicts. I’ve thought about replicating that on the blog, and halfway through responding to one of tonight’s emails I realized I was practically writing a blog post. So here it is. Please feel free to add your own responses to this Friend in the comments.

Dear Martin
I have read that Meetings that are
silent for long periods of time often wither away. But I can’t remember where I
read that, or if the observation has facts to back it up. Do you know of any
source where I can look this up?
Thanks,
CC

Dear CC,
I
can’t think of any specific source for that observation. It is
sometimes used as an argument against waiting worship, a prelude to the
introduction of some sort of programming. While it’s true that too much
silence can be a warning sign, I suspect that Meetings that talk too
much are probably also just as likely to wither away (at least to
Inward Christ that often seems to speak in whispers). I think the
determining factor is less decibel level but attention to the workings
of the Holy Spirit.

One of the main roles of ministry is to teach. Another is to remind
us to keep turning to God. Another is to remind us that we live by
higher standards than the default required by the secular world in
which we live. If the Friends community is fulfilling these functions
through some other channel than ministry in meeting for worship then
the Meeting’s probably healthy even if it is quiet.

Unfortunately there are plenty of Meetings are too silent on all
fronts. This means that the young and the newcomers will have a hard
time getting brought into the spiritual life of Friends. Once upon a
time the Meeting annually reviewed the state of its ministry as part of
its queries to Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, which gave neighboring
Friends opportunities to provide assistance, advise or even ministers.
The practice of written answers to queries have been dropped by most
Friends but the possibility of appealing to other Quaker bodies is
still a definite possibility.
Your Friend, Martin

Floating on Clouds

April 26, 2008

04/26/200806/04/2015 · Martin Kelley

Last weekend I found myself with the scenario no solo web designer wants to be faced with: a dead laptop. It was eighteen months old and while it was from Hewlett Packard, a reputable company, it’s always had problems over overheating. Like a lot of modern laptop makers, HP tried to pack as much processor power as they could into a sleek design that would turn eyes on the store shelf. They actually do offer some free repairs for a list of half a dozen maladies caused by overheating but not for my particular symptoms. When I have a free afternoon, a big pot of coffee and lots of music queued up I’ll give them a call and see if I can talk them into fixing it.

Once upon a time having a suddenly dead computer in the middle of a bunch of big projects would have been disaster. But over the last few years I’ve been putting more and more of my data “in the cloud,” that is: with software services that store it for me.

Email in the Cloud

I used to be a die-hard Thunderbird fan. This is Firefox’s cousin, a great email client. I would take such great care transferring years of emails every time I switched machines and I spent hours building huge nested list of folders to organize archived messages. About a year ago Thunderbird ate about three months of recent messages, some quite crucial. At that time I started using Google’s Gmail as backup. I set Gmail to pick up mail on my POP server and leave it there without deleting it. I set Thunderbird to leave it there for week. The result was that both messages would be picked up by both services.

After becoming familiar with Gmail I started using it more and more. I love that it doesn’t have folders: you simple put all emails into a single “Archive” and let Google’s search function find them when you need them.You can set up filters, which act as saved searches, and I have these set up for active clients.

Why I’m happy now: I can log into Gmail from any machine anywhere. No recent emails are lost on my old machine.

Project Management in the Cloud

I use the fabulous Remember the Milk (RTM) to keep track of projects and critical to-do items. Like Gmail I can access it from any computer. While messing around setting up backup computers has set me back about ten days, I still know what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can review it and give clients renewed timelines.

An additional advantage to using Remember the Milk and Gmail together is the ability to link to emails. Every email in Gmail gets its own URL and every saved “filter” search gets its own URL. If there’s an email I want to act on in two weeks, I set up a Remember the Mail task. Each task has a optional field for URLs so I put the the email’s Gmail URL in there and archive the email so I don’t have to think about it (part of the Getting Things Done strategy). Two weeks later RTM tells me it’s time to act on that email and I follow the link directly there, do whatever action I need to do and mark it complete in RTM.

Project Notes in the Cloud

I long ago started keeping notes for individual projects in the most excellent Backpack service. You can store notes, emails, pictures and just about anything in Backpack and have it available from any computer. You can easily share notes with others, a feature I frequently use to create client cheatsheets for using the sites I’ve built. Now that I use Gmail and it’s URL feature, I put a link to the client’s Gmail history right on top of each page. Very cool!

Another life saver is that I splurge for the upgraded account that gives me secure server access and I keep my password lists in Backpack. There’s a slight security risk but it’s probably smaller than keeping it on a laptop that could be swiped out of my bag. And right now I can log into all of my services from a new machine.

Keeping the Money Flowing from Clouds

The latest Web 2.0 love of my life is Freshbooks, a service that keeps track of your clients, your hours and puts together great invoices you can mail to them. I’m so much more professional because of them (no more hand written invoices in Word!) and when it’s billing time I can quickly see how many unbilled hours I’ve worked on each project and bang!-bang!-band! send the invoices right out. Because the data is online, I was able to bill a client despite the dead computer, providing my exact hours, a detailed list of what I had done, etc.

Others

Calendar: I always go back and forth between loving Google Calendar and the calendar built into Backpack. Because I can never make up my mind I’ve used ICal feeds to cross-link them so they’re both synced to one another. I can now use whichever is most convenient (or whichever I’m more in the mood to use!) to add and review entries.

Photos: Most of the photos I’ve taken over the past four years are still sitting on my dead laptop waiting for me to find a way to get them off of the hard drive. As tragic as it would be to loose them, 903 of my favorite photos are stored on my Flickr account. And because I emailed most of them to Flickr via Gmail most of those are also stored on Gmail. I will do everything I can to get those lost photos but the worst case scenario is that I will be stuck with “only” those 900.

Your Examples?

I’d love to hear how others are using “the cloud” as real-time backup.

More ways to QuakeQuake in the socialscape

April 7, 2008

04/07/200803/08/2018 · Martin Kelley

For any bleeding edge Web 2.0 Quakers out there, there’s now a QuakerQuaker FriendFeed account to go along with its Twitter account. Both accounts simply spit out the QuakerQuaker RSS feed but there might be some practical uses. I actually follow QQ primary by Twitter these days and those who don’t mind annoying IM pop-ups could get instant alerts.

Web 2.0 everywhere man Robert Scoble recently posted that many of his conversations and comments have moved away from his blog and over to FriendFeed. I don’t see that occurring anytime soon with QQ but I’ll set the accounts up and see what happens. I’ve hooked my own Twitter and FriendFeed accounts up with QuakerQuaker, so that’s one way I’m cross-linking with this possible overlay of QQ.

For what it’s worth I’ve always assumed that QQ is relatively temporary, an initial meeting ground for a network of online Friends that will continue to expand into different forms. I’m hoping we can pick the best media to use and not just jump on the latest trends. As far as the Religious Society of Friends is concerned, I’d say the two most important tests of a new media is it’s ability to outreach to new people and its utility in helping to construct a shared vision of spiritual renewal.

On these test, Facebook has been a complete failure. So many promising bloggers have disappeared and seem to spend their online time swapping suggestive messages on Facebook (find a hotel room folks) or share animated gifs with 257 of their closed “friends.” Quaker Friends tend to be a clannish bunch and Facebook has really fed into that (unfortunate) part of our persona. Blogging seemed to be resuscitating the idea of the “Public Friend,” someone who was willing to share their Quaker identity with the general public. That’s still happening but it seems to have slowed down quite a bit. I’m not ready to close my own Facebook account but I would like to see Friends really think about which social media we spend our time on. Friends have always been adapting – railroads, newspapers, frequently flier miles have all affected how we communicate with each other and the outside world. Computer networking is just the latest wrinkle.

As a personal aside, the worst thing to happen to my Quaker blogging has been the lack of a commute (except for a short hop to do some Haddonfield web design a few times a week). I’m no longer stranded on a train for hours a week with nothing to do but read the journal of Samuel Bownas or throw open my laptop to write about the latest idea that flits through my head. Ah the travails of telecommuting!

Lead-painted toys? Aye-Yeash!

June 19, 2007

06/19/200709/27/2016 · Martin Kelley

The Times has a fascinating article on the rise of recalls on Chinese-made toys over the last few years. Two of our kid’s “Thomas and Friends” wooden trains are part of the latest recall because of lead paint. We’ve long preferred the metal Thomas trains since 21-month old Francis chews on the wooden ones and gnaws their paint off.

We learned about the lead painted Thomas’s on the same day that our family doctor told us that it was officially time to become concerned with Francis’s slow speech development. When Theo was just a little older than Francis is now we put together a dictionary of his vocabulary. Francis makes cute sounds and seems bright and curious but he’s not even gotten out a consistent mama or papa and we haven’t been able to figure out a meaning for his most common word (Aye – YEASH). He’s got an appointment six months from now with specialists at Wilmington’s Nemours (that’s how backed up they are!).

We’re not blaming the trains — the lead ones we had were relatively unpopular and have few signs of wear. And we’re not panicking. My mother brushes off all concern with the assured declaration that kids learn to talk at lots of different ages. She could certainly be right of course: our doctor sent us to Nemours for Theo with the worry that he had a big head. If Francis does turn out to be a little “slow,” well then we’ll just take that as another lesson plan God has for us.

Friends and theology and geek pick-up hotspots

June 4, 2007

06/04/200709/28/2016 · Martin Kelley

Wess Daniels posts about Quaker theology on his blog. I responded there but got to thinking of Swarthmore professor Jerry Frost’s 2000 Gathering talk about FGC Quakerism. Academic, theologically-minded Friends helped forge liberal Quakerism but their influenced wained after that first generation. Here’s a snippet:

“[T]he first generations of English and America Quaker liberals like Jones and Cadbury were all birthright and they wrote books as well as pamphlets. Before unification, PYM Orthodox and the other Orthodox meetings produced philosophers, theologians, and Bible scholars, but now the combined yearly meetings in FGC produce weighty Friends, social activists, and earnest seekers.”
…
“The liberals who created the FGC had a thirst for knowledge, for linking the best in religion with the best in science, for drawing upon both to make ethical judgments. Today by becoming anti-intellectual in religion when we are well-educated we have jettisoned the impulse that created FGC, reunited yearly meetings, redefined our role in wider society, and created the modern peace testimony. The kinds of energy we now devote to meditation techniques and inner spirituality needs to be spent on philosophy, science, and Christian religion.”

This talk was hugely influential to my wife Julie and myself. We had just met two days before and while I had developed an instant crush, Frost’s talk was the first time we sat next to one another. I realized that this might become something serious when we both laughed out loud at Jerry’s wry asides and theology jokes. We ended up walking around the campus late into the early hours talking talking talking.

But the talk wasn’t just the religion geek equivalent of a pick-up bar. We both responded to Frost’s call for a new generation of serious Quaker thinkers. Julie enrolled in a Religion PhD program, studying Quaker theology under Frost himself for a semester. I dove into historians like Thomas Hamm and modern thinkers like Lloyd Lee Wilson as a way to understand and articulate the implicit theology of “FGC Friends” and took independent initiatives to fill the gaps in FGC services, taking leadership in young adult program and co-leading workshops and interest groups.

Things didn’t turn out as we expected. I hesitate speaking for Julie but I think it’s fair enough to say that she came to the conclusion that Friends ideals and practices were unbridgable and she left Friends. I’ve documented my own setbacks and right now I’m pretty detached from formal Quaker bodies.

Maybe enough time hasn’t gone by yet. I’ve heard that the person sitting on Julie’s other side for that talk is now studying theology up in New England; another Friend who I suspect was nearby just started at Earlham School of Religion. I’ve called this the Lost Quaker Generation but at least some of its members have just been lying low. It’s hard to know whether any of these historically-informed Friends will ever help shape FGC popular culture in the way that Quaker academia influenced liberal Friends did before the 1970s.

Rereading Frost’s speech this afternoon it’s clear to see it as an important inspiration for QuakerQuaker. Parts of it act well as a good liberal Quaker vision for what the blogosphere has since taken to calling convergent Friends. I hope more people will stumble on Frost’s speech and be inspired, though I hope they will be careful not to tie this vision too closely with any existing institution and to remember the true source of that daily bread. Here’s a few more inspirational lines from Jerry:

We should remember that theology can provide a foundation for unity. We ought to be smart enough to realize that any formulation of what we believe or linking faith to modern thought is a secondary activity; to paraphrase Robert Barclay, words are description of the fountain and not the stream of living water. Those who created the FGC and reunited meetings knew the possibilities and dangers of theology, but they had a confidence that truth increased possibilities.

SEO Myths II: Content Content Content, the Secret to SEO

February 27, 2007

02/27/2007 · Martin Kelley

Whenever
I talk with fellow web designers, the issue of “SEO” invariably comes
up. That’s techie slang for “search engine optimization,” of course,
that black science of making sure Google lists your site higher than
your competitors. Over the years a small army of shady characters have
tried to game the search engine results.

I’ve always thought such tricks were pathetic and bound to lose over
the long term. Search engines want to feature good sites. It’s in their
best interest to make sure the sites listed are the ones people want to
see. A search engine that returns unsatisfactory results quickly
becomes a has-been in the search engine competition. So as soon as a
site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skewing the rankings they tweak their secret search algorithm to fix the SEO loophole.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it’s easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site
they’ll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting
together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write,
write.

I’m looking to join a web design house, which means I’ve been
interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me
the best way to increase SEO for their
clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I’m an idiot
but it’s absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over
100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation
get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many
of the same results – blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content
on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly
start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug – your
company’s life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer
service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I’d get a
particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching
an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and
searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn’t always
pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get
answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk.
Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a
blog post. By the end of a year, I’m sure the volume coming from these
obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday’s Long Tail Strategy
post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search
engine’s one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine,
think about whether it’s bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would
come in and we’d spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation
reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could
have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper
that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates
gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour
trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I
slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down
into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area – to find my
workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took
no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We’re always blogging. It’s just that
most of the time we’re doing it verbally around the water cooler with
three other people. Learn to type it in and you’ve got yourself a
high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways
to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was
tagifying my personal blog over at “QuakerRanter.org.” Every time I
post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the
article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in
such a way that results send the term through the site’s search engine
to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I’ve used
that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk
about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we
automate them). We don’t necessarily know the categories that our
potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites
increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239
entries but 3,860 pages according to Google.
It’s the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of
this extra volume. This doesn’t increase traffic by that nearly that
much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag
indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.

Opening up the QuakerQuaker listings

January 9, 2007

01/09/200702/19/2012 · Martin Kelley

Everyone can now add posts to the QuakerQuaker category listings. Simply bookmark the post in Del.icio.us, list the QQ categories and it will be added to the page.
For example, say you’ve seen just the coolest post on Convergent Friends. Go to the “Convergent Friends”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/convergent_quakers page to find the right “tag” – in this case “quaker.convergent”. Bookmark the post you like, write a title and description and list “quaker.convergent” as its tag. An hour or so later the post will show up on the Convergent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are “instruction on how to use Del.icio.us and title pages”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_zone_how_to/.

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Teaching Quakerism again

October 5, 2006

10/05/200603/30/2015 · Martin Kelley

Getting right back on the horse, I’m teaching Quakerism 101 at Moorestown NJ Meeting Wednesday evenings starting in a few weeks. The original plan was for the most excellent Thomas Swain to lead it but he’s become rather busy after being tapped to be yearly meeting clerk (God bless ‘im). He’ll be there for the first session, I’ll be on my own for the rest. A rather small group has signed up so it should be nice and intimate.

For the last year I’ve been pondering the opportunities of using mid-week religious education and worship as a form of outreach. Emergent Church types love small group opportunities outside of the Sunday morning time slot and it seems that mid-week worship is one of those old on-the-verge-of-death Quaker traditions that might be worth revitalizing and recasting in an Emergent-friendly format.

Last Spring I spent a few months regularly attending one of the few surviving mid-week worships in the area and I found it intriguing and full of possibilities but never felt led to do more. It seemed that attenders came and went each week without connecting deeply to one another or getting any serious grounding in Quakerism.

Reflecting on the genesis of a strong Philadelphia young adult group in the mid-1990s, it seemed like the ideal recipe would look something like this:

6pm: regular religious ed time, not super-formal but real and pastoral-based. This would be an open, non-judgemental time where attenders would be free to share spiritual insights but they would also learn the orthodox Quaker take on the issue or concern (Barclay essentially).
7pm: mid-week worship, unprogrammed
8pm: unofficial but regular hang-out time, people going in groups to local diners, etc.

Unprogrammed worship just isn’t enough (just when y’all thought I was a dyed-in-the-plain-cloth Wilburite…). People do need time to be able to ask questions and explore spirituality in a more structured way. Those of us led to teaching need to be willing to say “this is the Quaker take on this issue” even if our answer wouldn’t necessarily pass consensus in a Friends meeting.

People also need time to socialize. We live in an atomized society and the brunt of this isolation is borne by young adults starting careers in unfamiliar cities and towns: Quaker meeting can act as a place to plug into a social network and provide real community. It’s different from entertainment, but rather identity-building. How do we shift thinking from “those Quakers are cool” to “I’m a Quaker and I’m cool” in such a way that these new Friends understand that there are challenges and disciplines involved in taking on this new role.

Perhaps the three parts to the mid-week worship model is head, spirit and heart; whatever labels you give it we need to think about feeding and nurturing the whole seeker and to challenge them to more than just silence. This is certainly a common model. When Peggy Senger Parsons and Alivia Biko came to the FGC Gathering and shared Freedom Friends worship with us it had some of this feel. For awhile I tagged along with Julie to what’s now called The Collegium Center which is a Sunday night Catholic mass/religious ed/diner three-some that was always packed and that produced at least one couple (good friends of ours now!).

I don’t know why I share all this now, except to put the idea in other people’s heads too. The four weeks of Wednesday night religious ed at Moorestown might have something of this feel; it will be interesting to see.

For those interested in curriculum details, I’m basing it on Michael Birkel’s Silence and Witness: the Quaker Tradition (Orbis, 2004. $16.00). Michael’s tried to pull together a good general introduction to Friends, something surely needed by Friends today (much as I respect Howard Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years it’s getting old in the tooth and speaks more to the issues of mid-century Friends than us). Can Silence and Witness anchor a Quakerism 101 course? We’ll see.

As supplementary material I’m using Thomas Hamm’s Quakers in America (Columbia University Press, 2003, $45), Ben Pink-Dandelion’s Convinced Quakerism: 2003 Walton Lecture (Southeastern Yearly Meeting Walton Lecture, 2003, $4.00), Marty Grundy’s Quaker Treasure (Beacon Hill Friends House Weed Lecture, 2002, $4.00) and the class Bill Tabor pamphlet Four Doors to Quaker Worship (Pendle Hill, 1992, $5.00). Attentive readers will see echos from my previous Quakerism 101 class at Medford Meeting.

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